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Episode 12
Unpacking the Latest Digital Advertising Trends
About This Episode
We’re checking the pulse on all things programmatic and chatting about the latest digital advertising trends. We also explore emerging channels in the programmatic space.
Brandon Langevin | Director of Sales, StackAdapt
Mark Shannon | Director, Client Services, StackAdapt
Transcript
Episode Introduction (00:00:00)
Proactively working against a fear of a recession is causing large brands and advertisers to be a lot more cost-conscious. And like we saw when COVID started, marketing dollars are usually the first thing to be cut. As a result of that, I think the biggest challenge that we’re going to see this year is how advertisers are approaching the topic of waste and efficiency, whether that be through more customization and personalization, or really prioritizing channels that have measurable and tangible results.
How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:34)
But then you think about the social landscape research and data is hugely significant when we combine all of these different touch points, so that long-term loyalty and then diving into the clicks to leads to sales, gotten to a point where it can drive better results in audience targeting, and really is what’s going to set you apart. You’re tuning in, you’re tuning in, you’re tuning in to the How Agencies Thrive podcast.
Matt (00:00:55)
Welcome to the final episode of season three of the How Agencies Thrive podcast. My name is Matt, and I’m on the Education and Development Team at StackAdapt. And today, we have a very special episode joined by two very special guests. As a way to end off the season right, we’re going to be doing a pulse check on programmatic with none other than Mark Shannon and Brandon Langevin over from StackAdapt. And in this episode, we’ll cover the latest trends in digital advertising, talk about emerging channels, technology, and so much more. So welcome, Mark and Brandon, you both been on the podcast before, great to have you back. What I wanted to do just to get our listeners up to speed on who you are, in case they haven’t heard from you yet. Starting with you, Mark, tell us a little bit about yourself, your role at StackAdapt areas of expertise. And you know, tell us how long you’ve been in programmatic. And then Brandon we’ll pass it off to you and do the same.
Mark (00:01:52)
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having us on. So my name is Mark Shannon, and I’m a Director of Client Services here at StackAdapt. I’ve been fortunate to be on the StackAdapt team for almost five years now. And in that time, I’ve seen a lot of change in innovation, not only with our platform, but in the industry as a whole. So I work really closely with our Client Services teams comprised of our account managers or programmatic strategists. And the short version of what we do is we take incredible executions, and make them perform wonderfully well, and work very closely with our agency and brand partners to ensure a high level of collaboration. And really to make sure that everything goes off without a hitch.
Matt (00:02:37)
Awesome. Thanks so much, Mark. Now, Brandon, tell us a little bit about you.
Brandon (00:02:41)
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us on, Matt. It’s it’s fun to be back. And for anyone listening that I have yet to meet. My name is Brandon, and I’m a Director of Sales here at StackAdapt. I’ve been here for just about six years now. And obviously, it’s been pretty exciting six years for as far as the company is concerned, going from 30 people when I when I joined on to over 1,000 now globally. My role is fairly straightforward. I work in tandem with Mark and a number of other amazing people at StackAdapt to ensure that all of our clients are being serviced the best way possible, through our account executives and account managers, and continue to provide best-in-class support and strategy recommendations to ensure all parties working with StackAdapt, including ourselves are successful in the long run.
Matt (00:03:34)
Fantastic. So as I mentioned at the beginning, what we’re going to do is really do a pulse check on programmatic, talk about what’s happened in the past what’s going on right now and what the future looks like, we figured this would be a great way to end off on the season. So what I wanted to do is jump back, travel back in time a little bit to 2021. Thinking back to when I started hosting the podcast, this was the beginning of our second season. And we were still in the height of the pandemic and the height of all this uncertainty that was happening in the world. And we discussed how the digital landscape was evolving some of the silver linings that had happened out of the pandemic, and really how the advertising industry had changed. So I wanted to ask both of you, if you can think back that far, what were some things that either of you kind of predicted would happen in the future, back in 2021? Or some things that you were totally spot on about, what were some things that you weren’t spot on about that you kind of missed the mark on and then what were some things that totally surprised you that you hadn’t thought of?
Mark (00:04:44)
Well, I mean, right off the bat, hindsight is always 2020. Right. So looking back, it’s nice to be able to say well, I was always very right about this. But something that’s always kind of been on the forefront of my mind is attribution. You know, I’ve had lots of conversations about it with clients, with our Client Services team individually, you know, I’ve been a huge proponent of the fact that, you know, things like UTM, or you know, identifiers or cookies or different ways to essentially attribute the performance of a campaign back, you know, the platform, or the individual line item, that drove those conversions or those actions as incredibly important. And, you know, we’ve always worked to anticipate discrepancies before they happen, work with our measurement partners, and proactively, you know, work to address those. And, you know, I saw that there was gonna be this shifting landscape, you know, we’ve always recommended that people worked with our StackAdapt pixel, because it can track events very reliably on an event basis, instead of just looking at session data, such as, you know, other analytics properties. And you know, we’re seeing things like Google Analytics, moving from their JS analytics to GA4 which uses event-based data, it’s that session-based data, and it provides a lot more capabilities and integration possibilities with media platforms across the board. So you know, it’s nice to see that something that I’ve been a huge advocate for a couple of years ago, is actually taking a little bit more of a center stage moving forward. Now, on the other hand, something goes absolutely wrong about the success of short-form video. And, you know, brand partnerships with companies such as TikTok, I’ll be honest, having a start in social media myself, and you know, seeing the evolution of online conversations, you know, from Twitter, to Facebook, and you know, there are others across the board there I was, I was very bearish success of TikTok. And I was definitely a late adopter. I don’t know if this is just, you know, highlighting the generational differences and the blindness I have to that. But much like Jon Snow, I think that proved that I know nothing. And I definitely need to develop a better understanding of that. Something we got surprised about, honestly, 2021, you know, as I mentioned, was an uncertain and difficult time. And it was really difficult to look optimistically toward the future, you know, turn on any news channel, and we’re just bombarded with bad news stories about the global pandemic. And, you know, I thought we’d be stuck at home a lot longer than we have been to be honest, so with traveled opening up, you know, we’ve seen a significant rise and things like, you know, foot traffic attribution, and, you know, relying on travel and visit metrics, especially as travel and tourism campaigns have started to pick up. So I’m surprised with the speed at which they did pick up and success we’ve seen, you know, so soon after coming out of this global pandemic. And, you know, just being here to support that renewed demand is kind of in our mandate.
Brandon (00:07:55)
Mark, you’re showing our age by talking about how bearish we were on TikTok, but I’m right there with you. And I think to add on to that, I’ve never pretended to predict the future. And I really tried not to do it during the height of COVID, obviously, with so much uncertainty and feels quite nice to be hopefully on the other side. But something that I was very surprised that in looking back, I don’t think I should have been, but their resilience of our industry as a whole, to bounce back and be able to capitalize on the regrowth of advertising as a whole as things started to get better, was a very pleasant surprise. We, like everybody else obviously saw quite a few budget cuts and restructures in not just a programmatic landscape, but marketing as a whole, I think most businesses throughout the height of COVID, were looking to cut cost and try to be as efficient as possible. And a lot of time, marketing budgets were the first ones to go. But looking at our industry now, I don’t think it’s ever been stronger. There’s obviously quite a few big changes coming in the digital space over the next months and years. But in terms of how digital advertising is bought and executed, I don’t think we’ve ever been in a better position than we are now. And given how uncertain everything was two years ago, it was quite a big surprise. And obviously a surprise for the better, especially for us on this call and everybody listening and yeah, really excited to see what the rest of 2023 has to bring.
Matt (00:09:34)
Now on that present note staying there. I’d love to get both of your thoughts on two areas. Number one is emerging advertising channels. And number two is emerging technology in the ad space. So we’ll start with emerging advertising channels.
Brandon (00:09:50)
Yeah, I think within the programmatic space specifically and talking with StackAdapt in mind, we were trying to follow as many dominoes as we could in terms of inventory access and ways to buy programmatically. I think, for us, one of the last dominoes to fall earlier in 2022 was digital out-of-home. And we explored the possibility of buying on digital out-of-home platforms pre-COVID, and pre-pandemic. But there really wasn’t a ton of consistency or inventory available, or even back-end infrastructure to buy at scale. And think with COVID, and obviously, way less people spending large amounts of time outdoors, it gave all those inventory providers almost an extra two years to develop stronger technology and stronger inventory that you can bid on programmatically. And for us, as recently as last year, we made the decision to start running and buying digital out-of-home inventory. And I think that’s only going to increase over the course of the calendar year and into 2024 and 2025. As that backend infrastructure continues to develop, but what we’re starting to see is sort of similar to the CTV wave we saw around 2019, but more so in 2020 and 2021, in that kind of the latest and greatest channel. And we’re going to be marrying that native exposure you would expected in an outdoor environment, whether that be a billboard or a bus stop, add in, you know, a local town all the way to a full takeover of Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, and marry that with the targeting sophistication and measurement side of digital advertising. So, for us being able to invest in that and start offering it to clients has been really exciting. And with advancements in measuring attribution through things like device IDs and exposure, and then moving those users down a consumer journey through various screens, whether that be in their home, office, on the way to work coming back from the gym, or on the way to a restaurant in the evening, through again, any screen you could think of is only going to further empower marketers to make sure that they are where their target audience is, and exposing them with relevant messaging. So long story long, very excited about digital out-of-home and how quickly it’s increasing and backend infrastructure sophistication. And it’s going to be really interesting here.
Mark (00:12:33)
And I mean, to add on to that, like speaking of, you know, reaching users on any screen, we can think of an endgame that, I think, is going to be something that really hits the mark, for a certain subset of audiences. So we’re already reaching them on those screens, but now we have different ways to reach them on those screens with in-game. And as a gamer, myself, this is near and dear to my heart. You know, quite often I’ve played, whether they’re free roam games, or racing games, or, you know, even some of those sports games, where you have advertisements around the billboards in a real-world setting. Even before programmatic advertising, I would play those games and always wonder, you know, where did those advertisements come up, or come from, you know, when the developers built the game, and they would just come up with these fake brands, but now we can actually put actual real-time advertisements programmatically served in in-game possessions. And it’s, I think, another avenue for us to get eyes on our brands, and to really introduce people to you know, some new campaigns and some new journeys that we want to send them on. The great thing is that, you know, building the technology into a platform like StackAdapt, we can really do things like retargeting those users with other channels, and ensure that, you know, we can have that full attribution through their entire user journey, from start to finish, performing whatever event that we want. It’s something that, you know, we’ve just really introduced not too long ago, and I see a lot of potential for this in the future, as more and more providers and publishers and the technology, you know, really starts to develop. I think we can, we’re gonna see big strides there.
Brandon (00:14:14)
Mark, I think you’re spot on. I myself, I’m not the biggest gamer. But I have been watching The Last of Us on HBO every Sunday. And I think that in itself speaks to the overall dedication and admiration for online gaming, whether that be through consoles connected to television, or gaming on your mobile device. And I think it’s important to almost contextualize in-game advertising as different from what people might think of in the in-app advertising space, where we’re actually talking about buying advertising space within real-time gameplay. And as more and more of that infrastructure continues to be developed. And we see more inventory become readily available. Personally, I think it would be really appetizing for a marketer to be able to align a specific audience and games, they’re playing with messaging that’s both contextually relevant, and exposing a user that they’ve long been going after. So really exciting stuff.
Matt (00:15:21)
So the second part of that question is with more of like emerging technology, so thinking of things like targeting what has really come out in the last couple of years, that’s been changing the industry?
Mark (00:15:34)
So I mean, one thing that we’ve been preparing for, as I mentioned earlier, is this cookieless future. And, you know, trying to ensure that we have ways to still, you know, address our users, but in a way that you know, doesn’t rely on the cookie to store that data about our audiences. And, you know, one of the big things that we’ve seen come out is contextual advertising. You know, in the early days of programmatic, contextual advertising was pretty huge. And, you know, then we saw a lot of audience-based things. And it’s kind of coming back, you know, there’s a heavy reliance on this, to ensure that we’re putting the right message in front of the right user at the right time, in a way that is completely compliant with their personal information. And, you know, isn’t storing too much data about that user as well. And, you know, as we see a lot of these regulations coming out across the board, we’ve got CCPA and GDPR. And, I mean, we haven’t seen the last of them. You know, I think this is going to be even more important than utilizing things like AI. So for example, our page context AI, you know, is a great way to ensure that, you know, we can really take advantage of these new tools in a way that is consistently adaptable in real time, and is compliant.
Brandon (00:16:50)
Yeah, it’s almost the advancement of new technology is a dependent variable on the deprecation of old technology, which is the loss of the 3rd-party cookie. So it’s, yeah, it’s romantic almost this year, you know, things that we were using five years ago, six years ago, are now coming back in full force and proving to be very effective. So I couldn’t have said it better myself, Mark.
Matt (00:17:18)
Awesome. So what we’ll do is we’ll move on to our third point here. And I guess the way we’ve been running the episodes, so far, we’re in the mindset of alright, we’re in 2023, what’s currently happening? Let’s jump forward to 2024. And in that time in between now and then, what are some challenges that marketers might be facing? Some hurdles to overcome? And what’s the best way for these marketers to stay ahead and stay savvy in the times ahead?
Brandon (00:17:51)
Yeah, great question. And I think there’s one major topic that’s been on everybody’s mind to start this year. And that is in the event of a marketing pullback, as fear of a recession, and proactively working against a fear of a recession is causing large brands and advertisers to be a lot more cost-conscious. And like we saw when COVID started, marketing dollars are usually the first thing to be cut. So that obviously presents a challenge to our industry, because that’s what we rely on to be effective and growing. But as a result of that, I think the biggest challenge that we’re going to see this year is how advertisers slash brands, agencies, and even, you know, the four of us in this room are approaching the topic of waste and efficiency. And I think, being able to really hone in on that, and limit the amount of waste that goes into all marketing buys, whether that be through more customization and personalization, or really prioritizing channels that have measurable and tangible results at any stage of a marketing funnel, whether that be at the very top or at the very bottom, helping our brand and agency partners really focus on the idea of less waste or less inefficiency is going to be a challenge, but something that we’re definitely prepped for and are already very actively approaching.
Mark (00:19:27)
Yeah, I mean, I couldn’t agree more. I think one of the things about personalization in particular is that, you know, our audiences expect this to happen, you know, they expect three-quarters of our audiences expect that companies are going to understand, you know, their very unique needs, and then they’re gonna tailor those ad experiences and those ad journeys to them. And I think that’s going to be a huge challenge. You know, for the next year or two and something that if you could stay ahead of, you know, you’re gonna win those customers, not just the first time but you’re going to continue to win those customers. And it’s going to be very important to ensure that, you know, we don’t really alienate the customers by delivering the ad at the wrong time to follow up to what I said about delivering the right ad at the right time.
Matt (00:20:14)
Awesome. Now, I wanted to ask you both a hypothetical question. As we get to the end of this episode here. Thinking about the future, still, assuming that the possibilities are endless. What are some wishlist items that you want to see whether it’s like a feature or capability and programmatic trends in the advertising industry? If you had the ability to make it happen, what what do you wish would happen to the industry and its technology?
Mark (00:20:43)
Okay. Good question. I guess I’ll start, I mean, okay, I’m gonna go with, I’m gonna start off with, you know, the biggest pie in the sky thing that I’d love to see, programmatically served drone swarm advertising fly bys, we should probably start working with our product team now on that, and you know, see what they can do. It’s just, you know, it’s something that I think it’s grown in popularity, just those drone swarms in the last little bit, and how cool would it be, if you could, you know, buy out your own programmatically served drone swarm. But realistically, you know, more down to earth, I think literally something that I’d really like to see, you know, speaking of AI, more AI-based intelligence and, or ad creation, I’m going to caveat that with an asterisk, with respect for artists, you know, there’s been a lot of controversy with, you know, the latest AI things where they’re basically iterative works, or copying from, you know, the existing works of either photographers or painters, or, you know, writers, you know, you say, create this in the style of, and I think that’s something that’s always going to be around, but, you know, to incorporate something that, you know, is respectful and responsibly uses that to essentially replace our creative teams or our copy teams, but to really enhance the role to give more points of reference and more points of inspiration to build, you know, award winning ad copy and award winning campaigns, that, you know, really drive performance. I want to see that really leveraged. And I hope someone does leverage that.
Brandon (00:22:27)
And Matt, can I can I ask how close to reality does my ask him to be as far fetched as you’d like it to be?
Matt (00:22:33)
I’m just interested to see what both of you thought about that. Because there’s, you know, there’s always so much speculation about where the technology is gonna go. So, yeah, again, it’s a wishlist item, assume that the possibilities are endless on this one.
Brandon (00:22:51)
Yeah. Well, I would say I’ll start with kind of the the pipe dream. I wish we could tell the future and know, when everything will be resolved with Alphabet and Google, both on the deprecation of the 3rd-party cookie, along with impending lawsuits that will likely result in divesting of their supply side, I think that entire topic as a whole has created quite a bit of uncertainty with how everything’s gonna look 12 months from now, and 24 months from now, but maybe my wish is that, you know, obviously can’t can’t tell the future. But have everyone within our industry kind of come up with one universally accepted new identifier, instead of seeing, you know, dozens and dozens of players trying to plant a flag in the ground and say, This is what we’re going to use moving forward and leaving a ton of advertisers who have mass amounts of 1st-party data kind of scratching their head terms of what’s what’s going to happen, you’ve got, yeah, I’d say probably two dozen strong and reputable organizations across our entire industry saying this identifier is the future. And this is what’s going to be adopted by everybody. And they’re all sort of butting heads. And yeah, my wish would be a little far-fetched for right now. But having one universally accepted new identifier that is not controlled by anybody within the ecosystem on the demand side or supply side that doesn’t have any sort of financial interest in that. Be applied universally and use universally, I would say, if we’re talking about things that are more likely to occur, something that we’ve really been looking for and seeking for a long time now specific to that connected Television. Some space would be more consistency. At the level of data we get within the bitstream. I think connected television as a whole has really come leaps and bounds from when it first really hit, hit its popularity in 2019, and 2020. But if we could get to a place where every bid request within a bitstream, in the connected television environment has parity, in terms of data that they’re passing through to a bitter, whether that be from an SSP, or a DSP, or anybody else. So we can know exactly where we’re buying and what we’re buying down to a show level, every single time, I think would would just empower both the advertiser the buyer and the seller, and make every advertising by just a little bit more efficient. Hopefully, we get we get there sooner than later. I know, it’s way better now than it was several years ago. But we still have some strides to make before we can confidently say every every bid request we get has the exact same data.
Matt (00:26:07)
Absolutely. Now, what I wanted to end off on and ask both of you about is resources for anyone who’s listening to this episode, what are some resources that either you’re personally using to stay on top of the programmatic industry, digital advertising as a whole, or even some that you would just recommend that you know, are great resources for anybody in the industry. So Brandon, I’ll start with you, and Mark, I will end with you. But what are some resources you recommend to our listeners?
Brandon (00:26:39)
Yeah, I think Mark and I were kind of joking about this a little bit. Before we jumped on. And yes, surprise, we did have a few topics outlined already. But we were kind of giggling here. And I said, I think our peers are enormous resources. I mean, I’m speaking as someone way smarter than myself, within StackAdapt. Right now, Mark, we’ve been working together for close to five years. And I learned something new from him all the time. And I think that same thing applies with everybody we work with, and whether that be within StackAdapt, or client partners or inventory partners, I think it’s really important to speak with as many of your peers as possible, because everybody has a slightly different area of expertise. And I wouldn’t know 99% of what I know now if it wasn’t from, you know, the consistent support and open dialogue between us and everybody else that we work with every day. And it’s it’s really helped to stay up to date on, you know, current trends that are going on within the industry, best practices, and anything else you could think of.
Mark (00:27:47)
I mean, I couldn’t agree more Brandon, I am an adamant believer that I am never the smartest person in the room, especially when you’re in the room with me. Likewise, I’m constantly learning something new from you. And I yeah, I agree, you know, your peers are often the best people to really fill in the gaps in knowledge that you might already have. There’s also this really great podcast, you might have heard of it, it’s called How Agencies Thrive. I think that’s a really great resource, to you know, to learn a little bit more about programmatic in the industry, to be a little selfish and self-promotional, we do have to StackAdapt blog, and we got there various external webinars that we do. I think those are really informational, and constantly learning from our peers that are putting those on. But there’s other resources, you know, there’s things like digital ad, or a marketer insider intelligence, that, you know, I’m always subscribed to things like marketing proof, I know they’ve got their own podcast, you don’t have to compete more to compliment you know, there’s there’s constantly new ways that you can pick up information. You don’t just have to rely on, you know, a random Google search or, I don’t know, even if there are programmatic books, you can grab crack open now, but there are a lot of great resources. And really, if you don’t know where to look, ask someone and they’ll probably be able to point you in the right direction. I think as we move into the next couple of years, and you know, we start getting out of our homes and maybe seeing people in person and collaborating more real time. It’s, it’s going to be really important that we lean on each other to see support in this industry, or to see performance and improvement in this industry.
Matt (00:29:25)
Well, Mark, I appreciate the endorsement of the podcast. And to both of you this was a fantastic way to end off season three. I couldn’t have thought of any better guests to have on this episode. So it’s always great to have both of you. So to our listeners, we hope that you found these insights very valuable and from us at StackAdapt. We’re looking forward to seeing what you can accomplish in your upcoming campaigns. So this has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast and we will see you in the next episode.
Episode Outro (00:29:58)
Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcasts on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback or just want to learn how agencies and brands work with StackAdapt, you can us at stackadapt.com. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
